"Church-going," Fenton returned, sententiously, "is small beer for small souls."

"There, Fenton," retorted Rangely, as at this minute they came to the corner where they separated, "don't feel obliged to try to be clever. You can't do it at this time of night."

Snaffle continued his walk with the artist almost to Fenton's door, although the latter suspected that it was out of his companion's way. Arthur was willing, however, to give the loser the compensation of his society as a return for the greenbacks in his pocket, and his natural acuteness was so far from being as active as usual that when he found Mr. Snaffle speaking of Princeton Platinum stock he did not suspect that he was being angled for in turn, and that the gambling for the evening was not yet completed. He listened at first without much attention, but the man to whom he listened was wily and clever, and after he was in bed that night the artist's brain was busy planning how to raise money to invest in Princeton Platinum.

"I never saw such luck as yours," Snaffle observed admiringly. "The way you filled that spade flush on that last hand was a miracle. It is just that sort of luck that runs State street and Wall street."

Fenton smiled to himself in the darkness, the proposition was so manifestly absurd, but he was already bitten by the mania for speculation, and when once this madness infects a man's brain the most improbable causes will increase the disease. Snaffle, of course, was too shrewd to ask his companion to buy Princeton Platinum stock, and indeed declared that although he had charge of putting it upon the market, he was reluctant to part with a single share of it. He added with magnanimous frankness, that all mining stock was dangerous, especially for one who did not thoroughly understand it.

But his negatives, as he intended, were more effective than affirmatives would have been, and the bait had been safely swallowed by the unlucky fish for whom the astute speculator angled. Fenton had invited him to the club to be eaten, but the wily visitor secretly regarded the money he lost at the poker table as a paying investment, believing that in the end it was not the bones of plump Erastus Snaffle which were destined to be picked.

XVIII

HE SPEAKS THE MERE CONTRARY.
Love's Labor's Lost; i.—I.

Mrs. Amanda Welsh Sampson sat in her bower, enveloped in an unaccustomed air of respectability, and in a frame of mind exceedingly self-satisfied and serene. She had secured a visit from a New York relative, a distant cousin whose acquaintance she had made in the mountains the summer before, and she hoped from this circumstance to secure much social advantage. For at home Miss Frances Merrivale moved in circles such as her present hostess could only gaze at from afar with burning envy. In her own city, Miss Merrivale would certainly never have consented to know Mrs. Sampson, relationship or no relationship; but she chanced to wish to get away from home for a week or two, she thought somewhat wistfully of the devotion of Fred Rangely at the mountains last summer, and she was not without a hope that if she once appeared in Boston, the Staggchases, who should have invited her to visit them long ago, she being as nearly related to Mr. Staggchase as to Mrs. Sampson, might be moved to ask her to come to stay with them.

It cannot be said that Mrs. Amanda Welsh Sampson, dashing, vulgar social adventurer that she was, had much in common with her guest. Miss Merrivale, it is true, had the incurable disease of social ambition as thoroughly as her hostess; but the girl had, at least, a recognized and very comfortable footing under her feet, while the unfortunate widow kept herself above the surface only by nimble but most tiresome leaps from one precarious floating bit to another. In these matters, moreover, a few degrees make really an immense difference. There is all the inequality which exists between the soldier who wields his sword in a disastrous hollow, and one who strikes triumphant blows from the hillock above. The elevation is to be measured in inches, perhaps, but that range reaches from failure to success. Whether social ambition is proper pride or vulgar presumption depends not upon the feeling itself so much as upon the grade from which it is exercised, and Miss Merrivale very quickly understood that while she was placed upon one side of the dividing line between the two, her hostess was unhappily to be found upon the other.